Category Archives: Confederate Flag Controversy

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My last article on the Confederate Flag controversy stirred up a controversy of its own. So here’s some of your replies and my responses, that especially focus on a few readers who, I contend, have a seriously ignorant–though authoritarian–world view on US history, slavery and racism that needs a compassionate Zen sticking.

***

NANCY W.
What an Epic article [Read Part One Here], nice, truth, can’t wait to hear all the feedback.

HOGUE
Hi Nancy, and everyone, well now, we start with, gee, let me guess, a string of white people either deflecting that slavery was the core of the Southern way of life (a way of racism) or making some stabs at apologias. Speaking of that, I apologize for Genevieve, R.C.C., and Helen’s bad punctuation. We all make mistakes, but at least I know what a “spell check” is and I care enough about my readers to use it.

Let me say for starters that I love you all, especially those of you with your issues about reality, facts and the stain of some pretty moronic cultural programming brain-dirtying your minds. It’s not your fault. We come into the world as a tabula rasa (an empty page) that is blackened by the ideas, prejudices and identities of our parents, priests, politicians and pedagogues. I hope my compassionate encounters below work in some way to provoke a good brain washing clean of these illusions. I’m all for brain washing because our societies keep filling our brains with dirty mind crap. Meditation can help one learn a knack of cleaning the brain, moment to moment. My words below, some of then hitting hard, come from one who strives to wash his brain each moment so it can look at itself and at you, with a clean intelligence it was born with. As my meditation teacher Osho once said, “We are born intelligent. Stupidity is borrowed.”

***

We begin with the first response, written in upper case to promote a shrill delivery, I suppose. Try not to trip over her spacing and backward opening quotation mark:

GENEVIEVE
YOUR STATEMENT, ” STOLEN FROM THEIR HOMES IN AFRICA,” does not identify their aggressor black brothers who stole them from tribes and sold them to buyers on ships. the buyers did not go deep into the African jungles searching and seizing slaves, they were abundantly supplied to the buyers for profit. that does not mitigate what happened to them by the white traders, but the whole truth should be exposed at all times.

HOGUE
Yes, it is true that African slave traders did the raids and the selling to the white slave traders. Just try to think this through a little deeper, Genevieve. If there were no white slave traders buying, there wouldn’t have been a black on black slave trade.

Be mindful, everyone, especially those of you who identify with your white skin color, that there’s a habit programmed into the mind by social conditioning that seeks to diffuse or deflect our crimes by saying, “Others did the slave robbing, I just bought them.”

Yeah, what great people our white American ancestors associated with in Africa. True lowlifes who raid villages and drag people away to your ships and into the embrace of your chains because you encouraged their business.

If you thought being a Jew in a Nazi boxcar train trundling down the rail to a death camp was bad (and it definitely WAS), consider the naked black men and women of Africa packed like cargo in the holds of slave ships. Taken—stolen, Genevieve—from their continent by our white folk with guns and whips. (Clearly Genevieve is white. No African American, a descendent of slaves, would split hairs like she’s doing.)

Anyway, if the first outrage of slavery was bad, what the whites did to these people after the African traders passed them into their clutches is beyond terrible—the ocean journey on their slave ships

The whites were shackling their cargo on pallets with nary inches of space to breathe, stuffed beneath the next pallet and the next. Stack after stack of Africans laid into them, hardly able to move or breath, all spewing their diarrhea and sea sickness puke from top pallets to bottom—down, down, trickle down economical, it goes: the filth of human horror and misery.

Could Dante’s inferno be any worse?

Most of the weeks or months of the ocean journey were spent laid out like cord wood below decks in that stygian stench and the tropical heat. It was so bad that during brief exercise sessions above deck, some slaves broke free and plunged over the side. Death and drowning by the weight of their chains was better than living like that.

So Genevieve, I do take note and amend my article with the above and say to you, yes, African black and Muslim brown slave raiders committed the first crime. They did it because the first criminals, the white slavers made the business possible and profitable. The white slave traders remain—as I wrote—those who stole black people out of Africa in their Black Holocaust fleets of misery and horror. The journey’s end for the survivors was slavery—period. You can’t skirt this truth or dodge the blame.

***

Now to a different topic of great personal significance to me, my social media friends and neighbors who live in the Pacific Northwest. When is our Big One, our subduction zone earthquake, going to hit. My answer to Randy, it may be sooner than we think or want.

RANDY
Hope you’re staying cool over on the Island.

HOGUE
As best as we can, Randy. It is an indicator that global warming is rapidly heating up the world that a record number of people in the Pacific Northwest, including me, have purchased air conditioners this summer. I’ve kept weather records since I moved up here in early 1986 and in this way, I have seen first hand how the weather has slowly but inexorably changed, bringing more extreme, dry summers and heavier rainy seasons from autumn, winter through early spring. My personal data objectively indicates this.

We just had a massive dome high-pressure heat wave up here in the Puget Sound islands starting on 25 June and lasting until 10 July! It included a rather violent, dry thunderstorm on 29 June. I don’t think my records have ever recorded thunderstorms in June. A half-month heat wave is a record on my little island, and those readers living on the mainland in Seattle, Everett, Tacoma and the East side cities had it much worse, and longer than we on the breezy pine-firred islands.

This is a wakeup call, folks of the Northwest. This is a science fiction movie becoming fact before your eyes and inside your stifling houses and apartments. The tripping point I predicted would begin in 2010. The temperature tsunami is on. Right now it’s rolling slow but it will gain momentum and become a temperature avalanche after 2018.

It is time to get serious about locally empowering your communities to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent. You can do this. Don’t wait for the idiot world leaders or your federal government to awaken from the funky reverie of their globally warmed brain farts. The power to save the world is “local”, as I laid out in detail in Predictions 2015-2016. Please read that book. My Oracle is giving out solutions to our problems now, not just listing scary and accurate forecasts. Click Here and read more.

Now to subduction zone quakes…

RANDY
Curious if you’ve have any thoughts on the Big One mentioned in the New Yorker this past week? I’m wondering if you have any impressions about the timing, are we overdue or still a long way off? That’s eBook I would purchase.

HOGUE
I’ve linked (under “Big One”) everyone to that New Yorker article. Thanks for sharing it, Randy. I have more than an impression. I have a book. I’m putting it together now. It uses astrological forecasting and applies a novel theory about eclipses that may indicate August 2017 opens the window for “The Big One” i.e. the subduction zone quake and perhaps much more. Don’t worry, everyone, as Han Solo said to Luke Skywalker in “Return of the Jedi” when Luke was trying to stop him from taking out two unsuspecting Imperial Stormtroopers single handedly, Han turned, smiled and said, “Hey… Its me.”

Yes, that didn’t end so well for Han. There were more stormtroopers popping out of the redwood underbrush on Endor. Anyway, all turned out well. Just ask the Ewoks.

All seriousness aside, in this new book, I’m not going to go epic gonzo, hair-on-fire, slip me and the Northwest into the Pacific Ocean in a Jupiter Effect on you. A big seismic advent window may be opening in a little more than two years from now but I will balance prophecy with sober possibilities and they might not all be apocalyptic. I’ll have this book ready for you early next year. Stay tuned. Stay “Hogueing” for more information on this website and also join my newsletter and social media pages..

RANDY
Speaking of eBooks do you offer your eBooks in a format that can be read on a standard PC?

HOGUE
Sometimes I do a PDF donors edition with an extra chapter the Amazon eBook editions won’t have. These donation-for-a-gift-book campaigns are a huge help financially for continuing HogueProphecy.

Writing is not a hobby, it’s my full-time job.

Right now I’m setting up for a PC friendly (and every other medium friendly) expanded book for donors only called Nostradamus: Premonitions of 9/11. This expanded edition will introduce my readers’ 9-11 premonition stories in an Appendix chapter that only donors will see. Click on the cover, or above link; or, read more about how you can contribute your Premonition story HERE.

Randy, I think if you Google your query you might find that there are apps free and available to download even Kindle books on your PC.

***

Back we go to the Confederate apologists who shy from using spell check like Peanuts character, Pigpen, avoids taking a bath.

R.C.C.
Hey Johnny,you’re story needs a little more research.You omitted Camp Dexter,the most notorious torture complex in the history of humanity,Honest Abe turned a blind-eye too all types of medical experiments,electro-shock submission and ,this just skims the surface !!!!!

HOGUE
You can use your exclamation marks to the point of disempowerment all you want, R.C.C. and cry me a river all the way to the Andersonville prisoner of war concentration camp holding Union POWs. Here’s why. Like Genevieve a little earlier, you are trying to turn attention away from the South’s crimes against humanity by pointing the finger at “honest Abe” and his crimes. That doesn’t wash with me. Other people torturing blacks doesn’t assuage the guilt of Southern white folk doing that, and more, making their “way of life” based on the slavery of others.

Racism in this country is deep north and deep southern, then as now. A whole lot of people in the North didn’t care about Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, either. They also saw this as a state’s right versus union matter first. It is a testimony to Lincoln’s evolution as a human being that he came to understand “the core” issue that most Union and certainly most Confederates hadn’t the genius or meditativeness to confront. Slavery is the core of the Southern, plantation-slave labor economic model. Otherwise, as my article above stated comprehensively—to those who can read without their fantasy history tales as mind filters—that the civil war was fought not for a state’s “right” but for when a state was outright “WRONG” abusing those rights within the Union of American states.

That’s how Lincoln evolved his views. Moreover, those Southerners who complain that he abused the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence by overturning certain states’ rights, he made RIGHT at least one thing, that ALL men are created equal. It took nearly 100 years to make that equality include women and just recently, people of unique sexual orientation. It’s about evolution R.C.C. Time to evolve.

R.C.C.
As for the mind-set that the civil war was all about the slave is a figment of someone’s demented dreams,MONEY was the straw that broke the camels back.The federal reserve went against the value of gold too the currency,and the south was taxed too the point of no return,I could go on and on,so……..do some more research,and tell me what you see……fair e-nuff ???????????????????????????????

HOGUE
Not at all. First off there was no Federal Reserve in the 1860s. It was created a century later, kiddo. (Such is your feeble grip on historical research.)

It matters not. Once again we have some defensive white person beating around the bush rather than cutting the South’s Lost Cause at the root. I don’t prune the leaves of this problem. I expose the crimes of all people at their source. Our crimes like our minion stupid actions and belief systems are “brain-dirtied” into us. We are programmed to commit them without full awareness of what we are doing. God forgive us—for we know not what we’re doing, when we are not self-aware, self-loving, and liberated in our intelligence beyond identification and conditioned reflexes forced on us by whatever society has imprisoned our heart and soul.

I’m not personally going after R.C.C. or Genevieve or later Helen. I am attacking their borrowed mindsets. It is an act of compassionate love for them. I will ever go after the programmed mind imposed by society on us that tries to prevaricate, dismiss or hide behind its conditioned reflexes to call its crime a virtue. It isn’t, whether the prevaricator is Abe Lincoln or it is “you.” This is done out of compassion for you all, my fellow dirty-brained. We need a brain washing. Our brains are filled with needless dirt from others. A meditative mind can clean itself far better and more constantly than one that stuck in borrowed mindsets.

But back to the evisceration of your point R.C.C., it is about money.

It’s about an economic business model that supports a way of life by enslaving one third of the South’s population, categorized as subhumans and therefore exempt from human decency, rights or legal protection. Slavery exists to make money for slave masters.

It was a noble thing Lincoln did. He advanced the war’s goals to embrace the higher value of fighting not only for the Union of the “United” States, but also for the sake of emancipating not just the blacks but all Americans from either living or doing business or sustaining ways of life based on the cancer of slavery. All your beating around the bush and protestations against this simply are reflections of a powerless defense of what is, down to its very core, a fundamentally and morally wrong point of view.

***

Now we come to Helen and her outrage and the outrages she commits against fact.

HELEN
Too bad you like to spout off like you know it all. There are still many of us alive who know the truth. Too bad you seem to appeal to the great half educated.

HOGUE
Speak for yourself, Helen. Moreover, do not presume you are “alive.” Most people walk through their lives like sleepwalkers dreaming they are alive, dreaming they have a soul. A deeper, spiritually skeptical inquiry into the nature of our dysfunctioning personalities might reveal just how dead we are when walking, talking, living and dying. It’s a good thing to expose this greatest conspiracy that turns everyone’s soul into a slave of ego. The reason being, that once you really confront just how robotic, mechanical, and socially identified with borrowed agendas of others you actually are, the sooner one drops being a spiritual phony. Then you begin seeing the world beyond the filter of a socially borrowed and egoistic flakery.

HELEN
I really doubt you’ll read this as you already believe you’re the all knowing all seeing one who can translate Nostradamas.

HOGUE
LOL, at least I know how to spell his name.

Again, speak for yourself. It sounds like you are unconsciously castigating someone in the mirror. It’s your shadow box, and when you get mad enough to throw a punch, you’ll just be breaking the mirror and making more ugly the reflections of your judgments of others.

HELEN
But all predictions can be subject to change because of the human free will.

HOGUE
Strange, that’s what I’ve been saying since 1987 in the last 600 articles and 31 books and counting. Is your reading of my work really that shallow and cavalier, before you start slinging the mud? Tsk…tsk…

HELEN
Facts:

HOGUE
Correction, projections hiding behind a selection of facts that suit watering down what is a crime against human beings. I apologize for Helen losing her grasp of the English language in the rest of her comment.

HELEN
1: The black African were abducted & sold by their own African people (including the illustrious Obama ancestors ) & brought over on ships to large ports like New Orleans therefore putting the slaves close to farmers who would be happy to have cheap labor there not being much profit in raising food. Being a farmer is a grueling risky business dependent on many things especially weather & a good crop. Not always a certainty.

HOGUE
Since Helen touts a love of “facts” lets start with Obama’s ancestors, the Luo tribe, who dwelled in what we call modern Kenya. FACT: they were not involved in the slave trade to the Americas. FACT: the African tribes who were involved all came from the faraway Western African coastal regions. FACT: At times white slave traders oversaw the raids and capture of black slaves, it was not solely a crime committed by black on black. FACT: the three centuries of white slave trading from the sixteenth into the nineteenth century was the catalyst for the black slave trade existing, and all the tribal wars white men’s hunger for cheep slave labor prompted. Genevieve, are you reading this?

Back to Helen.

Helen’s “Fact 1” is an even more incoherent attempt to uphold a way of life that was racist to the core. Blame your society’s crime on more aggressive African tribes predating on the weaker, more peaceful tribes selling their slaves to the whites for a one way trip, naked and afraid, in a piss, barf and shit saturated hell-hold of a slave ship. Next stop, slavery, a loss of freedom.

The whites didn’t ask these people to come to Louisiana slave markets to be sold. She almost makes it sound like slavery was some good favor done to help poor white farmers cut hiring costs by using slave labor—as if this was some virtuous move. Those poor farmers, let’s help them out.

Now let’s take Helen’s words further: “Being a farmer is a grueling risky business dependent on many things especially weather & a good crop. Not always a certainty.”

Yes, ma’am but at least we got our niggers to work the fields on our plantations, they’re in our chain gangs building our southern railroads, working in our southern milling factories from New Orleans to Wilmington NC. Farming can be uncertain but our labor force is steady because y’all “chain” them slaves to their work, so to speak. No labor unions, no worker’s rights. Heck! They’re not even as bothersome to deal with as indentured white laborers. They’re property, not people. And whatever we beat and work out of them profits the white race of the genteel South.

HELEN
[Fact] 2. The War between the states was never about slavery! That was the public statement just like the drivel the news media gives out now.

HOGUE
Again, if there was no slavery, there would be no tension between the North and the South. Northern heavy industry and the Southern “king cotton” did not compete with each other. Both exported their unique goods to the world and the South was the chief exporter of cotton in the world—including exports to the Northern states. You can’t grow cotton in the North, so, where’s the problem? Supply and demand had no conflict but only mutual benefit. Where’s the states rights controversy if there had been no slaves working the fields of the South? Because they depended on slaves, any Abolitionists move from the north to end slavery within the United States threatened to end the Southern economic reason for being—freeing their slaves.

HELEN

Those so-called share-cropping boys fought the Federal control being forced on them by the north. The north had industry but not farmland. The south had farms therefore the food the north wanted.

HOGUE
Helen, are you so embarrassingly uninformed of your own American history that you presume this ignorance as fact? You believe Pennsylvania had no farmland. Wisconsin? New York? Minnesota? Why were the Southern solders generally gaunt and lean and getting leaner as the war dragged on when the Union soldiers only got better nourished as hostilities continued.

Honey child, the main export of the South was “King Cotton” and if you are going to make this a civil war over food exports you’d get an F in history in the classes I attended when the education system wasn’t so, let’s say “simplified” for simpletons. But please, don’t stop there, go on… Next I’m thinking you might believe Lincoln really was a vampire slayer, because Hollywood movies and comics playing journalists are your next source of “fact.”

HELEN
Lincoln knew the truth of the war but knew that would not give the northern boys a reason to fight. He had to have a reason that would sound good. The powerful ones that convinced Lincoln to act are part of the same group today still trying to start WWIII. I would have thought as much as you know you might have figured that out.

HOGUE
Oh, LOL, I figured it out. My “bullshit” meter is pretty sensitive when it comes to revisionist history websites and conspiracy bloggers on the Internet trying to reshape history to match the more underdeveloped and lazy intellects. What you write in the following is a sad example of that, plus a lot of bad punctuation. Don’t you know how to use spell check? Anyway, onward you go:

HELEN
Lincoln was murdered by that same group when he refused to put the U.S. In debt by borrowing & paying interest to support the cost of the war. Until then the country had no debt. There’s been debt & interest paid ever since that stupid war.

HOGUE
I’m not even going to waste time addressing this ignoramus theory concocted from Internet dribble. Clearly Helen has never read up on the history of US war debts and how they were paid off, like the Civil War, pretty quickly. She probably got her information from the same place R.C.C. bought that bullshit about the Federal Reserve existing a century earlier than it actually did, giving Lincoln bad financial woes.

But Helen’s “Fact 3” assembling an apologia for slavery takes the cake.

HELEN
[Fact] 3. Not all slaves were abused or mistreated. Many were treated like family & some plantation owners provided them with education & health care & some were even given small plots of land.

HOGUE
That’s true, as true as some Jews were treated like family—you actually mean “family help” that is—when they served as slaves of the SS families and took care of the needs of those working the death camps when they came home from work all hot and bothered and needed the human ash dusted off their uniforms. Some concentration camps even allowed Jews plots of land for vegetable gardens, art classes, schools, and medical care. Just one thing they couldn’t get—freedom. Just like your black slaves who were “treated as family.”

Helen, some prisons are nicer than others. Good for them. But a prison is a prison. A society that keeps you under bondage, even as a “happy” slave,” is evil. You can’t get around this evil with your pathetic rationalizations.

And where’s your Christian heart?

I keep hearing how the South during the war was so religious. They were certainly pious about everything but “doing unto others” such as their niggers, as they would have be done to themselves. Oh, but there I go again, forgetting that black people aren’t “people.” Just like Jews aren’t Aryans. We can be kind to our dogs or cats—or our slaves—and be cruel as the prerogative of being higher evolved races.

HELEN
It’s just the way man is. Many men considered their wives as baby factories to have the children so they can work on the farms. Some are loving & caring & some are mean & abusive. Just as some husbands consider their wives & children as chattel & abuse them & make slaves of them even today.

HOGUE
So, you are now comparing the relationship of slaves to their slave owners to “marriage”?

Maybe, just “maybe” if this injustice should happen to you, that someone breeds “you” for farm laborers, or beats “you” Helen, and turns your marriage into a fearful and brutalized slavery. Maybe even if someday “you” are abducted from your home and then sold to slave traders and sent to be a slave laborer and baby factory of a brutal supremacist slave owner living in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, with no rights, completely dependent on the virtuous or deadly whims of your slave holders—THEN perhaps you might understand what “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” means.

It means you can’t excuse people being made slaves of others because a living and bright compassion has awakened inside. You’ll feel empathy. You’ll say, “I never would want to be treated as a slave is, therefore how can I defend slavery in any form? I don’t want to be a slave, how then, can I condone others being made slaves?”

That, sadly, is an awareness that is still lying dormant in you, Helen. Your heart is closed—your intellect, narrow. And you are the one who believes you are alive.

Someday, any unguarded moment from NOW, perhaps you will do unto others as you would be done by.

HELEN
It’s too bad so many ( like you) have not lived longer & known true history. I would guess you were educated after the “dumbing down of American” students started.

HOGUE
We end as we begin this interchange, with me saying, speak for yourself. I recognized in Helen another victim of the all-American dumb down to Stupid is as Stupid does. She’s graduated. Sad.

By the way, when I went to school in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was before the dumb down began in the mid-1970s, even though I found the school systems of those days weren’t satisfactory. The truth is, no education system can force you to learn basic research and study skills. One has to have the capacity, and, if you’re lucky—and it seems I was far luckier than Helen—you get your intelligence further enlightened by great teachers along the way.

I’ve been blessed to sit at the feet of great teachers. Thank you Dan Fichtner, Roger Schaefer, Alan Freeman, and so many many more.

I had the greater luck to move beyond intellectual teachers to a teacher of the soul, I sat before wisdom and love incarnate, when in India. With Osho, I was reborn into a whole deeper understanding. If you can recognize it in my writing, then you also have this potential just under the surface of your brain-dirtied mindsets, ready to fly free.

If you can’t recognize this aura between my written lines, I hope you someday can, otherwise you’ll be like Helen here, who will now write all the right words below, but not with the wisdom to turn the mirror of her consciousness upon herself. The reason being, she is yet unaware of that consciousness and maybe, she’ll never be so lucky as I’ve been to have been led to it in this life. Instead she’ll say the following and revel in the satisfaction of a spiritual blindness she sadly can’t even see:

HELEN
You’re smart but your opinions & translations are colored by your own prejudices & background. And you’re quite opinionated & rigid so no one can change your mind. Too bad. I feel sorry for you that you think you know it all & still have so much to learn.

HOGUE
In the end, we all live beyond or suffer the consequences of our borrowed and unconscious opinions, biases and prejudices. The difference between my prejudices and background with Helen’s is really a very small, atomic difference. The difference is this: I am beginning to look at my own ego, prejudices and conditioned background. Helen does not.

The truth of this will be borne out by how John Hogue and Helen live our lives. The first challenge is to really see whether we are really living—really “alive.” Meditation can help. If you, Helen, or any of those hundreds of thousands reading these interchanges above, resonate deep inside with what I’m sharing, the next step is to move beyond words and plunge deep into the secret elixir of life that is the science of self-observation—Meditation.

I invite you to Contact Me. Put one word in your email: Meditation. I will then freely share with you links, leads and information about the meditation techniques I use to discover the difference between the golden moment-to-moment real aliveness versus the fool’s gold coating of ego society teaches. Such people are in the vast majority. They are programmed to borrow and merely believe they are alive. They dream this dream unto death, never knowing the vast intelligence, love and compassion that is possible.

I invite you, Helen, and everyone reading, to test what I’m saying and explore these meditations.

***

DIWA
I read a bit of the confederate flag article and enjoyed the history. I know there are some who want to raze the carving on Stone Mt as well. That should be an interesting project for some engineers.

HOGUE
Really! I didn’t know it had come to that. You know it, as a friend and fellow traveler on the path of meditation (and bird watching) but the other readers might not know that I don’t support any form of censorship. I don’t even think the Confederate flag should be stolen from people’s private property. Yes, perhaps it need not be displayed on government buildings because being “public” means they are part of the commons and putting the Dixie flag on a state court flag pole might feel to some like the same as raising a Nazi flag for others.

OK, I respect that. Live and let live, but privately and even in a public way posted on your property. If you want to run up the swastika, the stars and bars or the southern cross battle flag, I defend your right to do so, just as I defend my right of free speech to convince others how stupid and ugly are the things these flags stand for.

Let your flag proudly wave, unmolested, to remind the enlightened how ugly for which it stood. We need these reminders. Thank you.

I don’t believe in arresting and incarcerating people like they do in the EU for denying the Holocaust. Isn’t that what the Nazis used to do when people denied Germans were a master race?

No, I welcome the holocaust deniers, the “Helen” slavery apologists to come into these pages and grace me with the opportunity to instruct and educate and enlighten them and other readers to what length Stupid is the dictatorship overshadowing our lives.

At the same time I defend, unto death, Helen’s right to be stupid and freely speak and write her stupidity. That also goes for Genevieve, R.C.C. and all the others who freely set down their views in these pages defending the Southern—way of the slave—Life.

I admire Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson riding their horses up yonder on Stone Mountain—not so much Jeff Davis, but that’s just me. Jackson and Lee were two of America’s greatest generals. They were honorable men who I can freely say made a terrible mistake. I can equally appreciate Lee’s patriotism defending Virginia first and the US second and see how it bound him to a cause that at its core was evil. I know that Lee was against slavery as a number of Southern soldiers were, but the binds that tie us mechanically to our duty can see good men and women fight for evil causes. I’m glad Lee survived his mistake and had the graciousness to submit to the reckoning (unlike Davis) and be, in the short span of years left to him, a pivotal voice of North and South reconciliation. For that, I would honor Stone Mountain’s sculpture and fight against anyone who thinks any form of censorship isn’t an act that goes around and eventually comes around to silence and suppress your freedom of speech or rub out your heritage and history.